


Pivot-points

by Trojie



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Compare and Contrast, Drabble Collection, Ficlet Collection, Flash Fic, Minor Canonical Character(s), Multi, Snippets, Soulless Sam Winchester
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-09-01
Updated: 2013-09-01
Packaged: 2017-12-25 07:01:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 29
Words: 3,175
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/950097
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Trojie/pseuds/Trojie
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Drabbles, flashfic and snippets comparing and contrasting Supernatural characters.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. wait and see - Lisa Braeden : Soulless!Sam Winchester

**Author's Note:**

> Yalumesse challenged me to write compare/contrast drabbles on pairs of Supernatural characters that she assigned me. It … got slightly out of hand. And is probably going to continue getting out of hand!

Lisa lets Dean walk out of the house with Sam, even though there's something off about him, even though she doesn't want to trust him, because she can see that he will bring Dean back.

Sam (soulless, practical Sam) doesn't (for example) burn Lisa's house down because, for now, Dean thinks he needs her. It'll keep.


	2. heredity - Bobby Singer : Adam Milligan

Bobby knows from the get-go that this stranger Adam is definitely John's kid. Even though he's no Dean and he's sure as hell no Sam, he's still got a bit of both of them - that streak of mule they all got from their daddy. 

Adam watches this Bobby guy with Dean and Sam, and okay, maybe he never really knew his dad, maybe he never really had his dad's full attention, but he shouldn't feel so goddamn jealous, because he gets the distinct feeling that maybe no-one else did either.


	3. the job description is flexible - Tessa : Benny Lafitte

Tessa has a duty; she takes lives when they're ready to be harvested - she shows souls the merciful face of Death at the appointed time and place. They call her kind reapers, as if they're grim, as if they're an end.

Benny's a monster, he should kill to eat, should kill to live, should be killin' for the fun of it but he don't - so every tasty little morsel that walks on by him is living on borrowed time, and they don't even know it.


	4. incision - Zachariah : Alastair

There are so many different ways to cut someone. Zachariah takes a pride in it, bleeding people dry for the cause. It's impersonal and it's for the greater good but oh, at the same time it so, so isn't. Zachariah adores his job. He takes everything they'll give, he takes everything he can and then he talks the rest of it out of people too - slices their tender parts with his words until all the good stuff falls out - the bargains and offers and oh, the prayers. Especially the prayers.

Alastair couldn't care less what Hell wants him to find or to get out of his work - he just works. There's something fragile and beautiful hiding on the inside of people, and all that potential dances best on the point of his knife. He only wants to make people shine, even if the only way they'll do it is redly and wetly.


	5. take one for the team - Nancy : Nick

Nancy will do it. She really will, if it will save everyone. The blonde girl with the knife who seems so eager to cut her open is stalking closer, and Nancy can almost feel how it will be, when the blade draws down and she's at the end of it. It will be the right thing, the blonde girl promises her it will, but the demon-worshipping Winchesters talk everyone out of it, and in the end, Nancy doesn't give herself up. She dies anyway.

Nick was always going to say yes. Nick has nothing left to live for anyway, and this way, maybe something good will come out of his pain, and he'll be gone, far away. Nick just wants his world to end. So he says yes. Lucifer keeps Nick's eyes open, through all of it.


	6. practicalities - Amy Pond : Ava

It becomes the only way you can survive. Amy hides and survives and starves herself, subsists on chemicals from dead men's brains. She gets a social security number, and rents an apartment. 

Ava kills, and kills again, and every time she enjoys it a little bit more, until she starts to think she's a demon too and that humans are her natural prey. It's a hell of a learning curve.


	7. the fourth wall is a safety barrier - Chuck Shurley : Charlie Bradbury

Chuck always liked stories, until they started to eat through his brain and bleed through his fingers, until he wrote them down and tried to sell them and got nothing but hate and hype and something they called 'cult status'. Until they started coming true.

When Charlie was little she always peeked carefully into wardrobes, and even though she was older than eleven when she read Harry Potter for the first time she still half-hoped for an owl-delivered letter - and then the monsters started coming for her. Turns out the real world had never existed after all.


	8. connections - Karen Singer : Bela Talbot

Karen married Bobby because she loved him. He killed her because he loved her back. It was a very simple story, in the end.

Bela thought she'd keep herself safe by keeping herself apart, by reading the fine print, by always making sure she looked out for her own self-interest. It was only when it was too late that she worked out she could have used a friend.


	9. what are we fighting for? - Lilith : Balthazar

Lilith was Firstborn, and she loved her maker, loved him enough to find him and unbury him with her own blood. He stepped over her corpse on his way to bigger and better things.

Perhaps Balthazar does have a family, but their Father doesn't seem to be around and his brothers and sisters are too busy fighting and frankly, Balthazar is tired of it. Is he the only person on any plane of existence who isn't desperate to sacrifice themselves for something?


	10. do the right thing - Victor Henriksen : Madison

Henriksen works eighty hour weeks for nearly a year and a half to put the Winchesters away. He knows it's going to be worth it. And when he fakes their deaths, it _is_ worth it. He doesn't even hesitate.

Madison isn't stupid. It'd be nice, hell, it would be great, if she could just lock herself up every full moon, but Dean's right. She hands Sam the gun.


	11. form and function - Samandriel : the Impala

Samandriel is an angel. He is faith and light and obedience, written into his being. It isn't that he blindly follows instructions, it's that doing the work of Heaven is everything that he is. Crowley taps into that with a spike, but he could have used a key if he'd had the right one. Samandriel is an angel, and he is a function, and he is beloved.

The Impala might not have been intended for hunting by her designer but it's what she is just the same, it's in her metal soul. There's blood in the stitches of her leatherwork and holy water soaked into the lining of her trunk and her key lives in Dean Winchester's pocket, warmed through by his body, and adored. She will never be left behind.


	12. your part to play - Claire Novak : Azazel

Claire Novak was a vessel, for a tiny moment in time. She had power and use. And now she has no father and no angel and no purpose, and she's supposed to just be a girl again? How?

Azazel goes back to Hell knowing he fulfilled his purpose and he rests, dead and happy in the pit of fire. It was a long game, and he won.


	13. innocence -  Jessica Moore : Jesse Turner

Jessica Moore is a clever girl. Precocious, too, and forward, if you're speaking in the old-fashioned sense, and proud of it. She laughed the first time she kissed Sam, because he didn't have a clue what he was doing even though he thought he did, and she showed him. She showed him a lot of things. But when the demon comes for her, she's an innocent, a babe in arms in the face of the dark at the root of the world.

Jesse Turner believes whatever people tell him, and because people don't tell little boys the truth, he doesn't know a thing. Eventually men come to kill him, or to hide him, and they tell him what's really true - that there are powers in this world stronger than any of the things that supposedly live in the closet or come out of the TV. And Jesse realises he already knew that, somewhere in his gut.


	14. you do the job you have to - Deanna Campbell : Rachel

Deanna Campbell puts dinner on the table at 6pm every day, and can field-strip a weapon faster than her husband although he'll deny it to his dying day. And when she sees him yellow-eyed and stabbing himself, it's just reflex to try and save the young man (he looks so familiar, why does he look so familiar, and so sad?) he has tied to one of their dining chairs. Deanna Campbell dies like a hunter, with her apron on and flour dusted across one cheek.

The Angel Rachel is a loyal subject of Heaven. Not a lackey to the current incumbent at the top of the angel power struggle. She does not know where their Father is any more than anyone else does, but she understands very well her duties. She dies betrayed and righteous at the hand of one of her own, knowing that, unlike so many of her brethren, she at least tried.


	15. you were both made for this - John Winchester : the Impala

When you used to be a Marine the life of a hunter's piss-easy - it's all still that same shit, different day rhythm. Clean your weapon. Make your bed. Drink your goddamn coffee. No point asking questions, Winchester, you ain't gonna get no answers. Just do your job the best you can, fight the good fight until you can't fight no more, and maybe they'll send you somewhere nice when it's over.

And her, she's everything you need. Big and lazy, revs like a thunderstorm, makes guys smile and girls purr. You turn up to a town with a gun in your glovebox, your car is your cover. The Impala saves so much time, so many lies. Only good ol' boys drive cars like her. You rattle off her stats and there isn't a cop in the country who won't let you by with a wave and just that little taste of envy. She's perfect.


	16. alternate universes - Endverse!Dean Winchester : Dean Smith

Pre-dawn light, five mile run, grab some breakfast that tastes like wallpaper-paste - 

\- and that's where their lives diverge.

Dean Winchester of Camp Chitaqua shoots Croats and raids supermarkets for toilet paper and propane. Dean Smith crunches numbers, writes reports, sweet-talks IT into fixing his printer when it craps itself. 

Dean Winchester watches his best friend live stoned out of his mind on past-their-use-by painkillers, and hunts what's left of his own brother to put him down like a dog. Dean Smith doesn't have a best friend, or a brother. Or a dog. 

There are times they'd both probably jump at the chance to swap.


	17. focus - Ash : Becky Rosen

The world makes sense to Ash better through the bottom of a bottle and the glow of a screen. Works the way he wants it to there, and he can make shit dance and jump and fuckin' pirouette for him - all the numbers doin' their thing and showing him the truth. People are erratic and stupid and Ash likes 'em fine but they ain't pure like figures are, and some days he don't understand them at all, and he knows they don't understand him. But his laptop always does.

Becky got called 'socially awkward' a lot at high school and that's basically a self-fulfilling prophecy, because if you take a fifteen year old girl and tell her she's weird often enough she becomes it. Becky understands that perfectly well, and frankly, those high-school bitches can take a hike. But she can't deny that the ways society works sometimes are just too sucky for words, and people are awful and don't even seem to have reason to be, and it's just ... it's easier to hide away with fiction. She likes her omniscient POV.


	18. there is an order to things - Dick Roman : Jody Mills

It's about predators and prey. Dick Roman is a predator, and it is right and natural that he should be here on Earth, at the apex finally, where he was designed to be. Humanity can just settle right on down - 'fair' is a concept for sheep. Leviathan have the biggest teeth, and that's all there is to it.

Jody Mills believes in justice and law, and in doing the right thing. She also believes in her service-issue pistol, in borax and her machete. Justice carries scales, yes? Jody takes that to mean that it's natural to try and weight the balance in your favour.


	19. authorial intent - Chuck Shurley : Kevin Tran

Chuck writes fiction. That's all he does. It's not even particularly good fiction, but that's not the point.. The point is that he still, after everything, can't quite get rid of the feeling that Sam and Dean just sprung fully-formed from his head, that he made them up and that the things that happen to them happen because he says so. It's ... not a good feeling. 

Kevin translates. That's all he does. Just because no-one else can do it doesn't mean that's not what he's doing. It's information transfer. And when he starts to get the visions that's what he categorises them as as well, because it's that or be haunted by this powerless feeling of knowing without being able to do a goddamn thing.


	20. inches lead to miles - Ellen Harvelle : Madison

There's one thing Ellen never regretted, not once, and that was Bill. But along with Bill came the hunting, the research, the guns and knives. Came Jo, eventually, and _god_ but Ellen loves her baby girl, can't deny her a goddamn thing, so when the hunting and research, guns and knives came out again, Ellen didn't have the heart to say no. Once you know the truth about what's out there, ain't no way you can go back. You just do what you have to.

Madison should never have let those cops into her house. But then again, she should never have walked home alone that one time, or dated skeezy control freaks. Maybe some things are just inevitable, at the end of chains of events you didn't even realise were starting when you picked up your end. Now she knows, of course. What she is. And it can't go on.


	21. never give in, never surrender - John Winchester : Lucifer

John's a domino in a long line of dominoes, and some days he can see it but he still can't help how he falls - he was pushed. Mary's death, the demon's plan, he can see they must have known how he'd react but that doesn't mean he can just walk away. He _has_ to do this. 

Lucifer waits. Sooner or later the Rube Goldberg machine of his children will make the pieces fall into place that will free him, equip him, maneouvre him into his rightful place. All he has to do is be patient.


	22. it's about management style - Lucifer : Crowley

Lucifer doesn't give a damn how they manage themselves. Regimentation is Heaven's way, not his. If his demons want to cavort around in the blood of human virgins, let them. Until he needs them, they're welcome to do as they please, deal as they please, destroy as they please. What does he care about messes?

Crowley wants the demons lined up and ready. He wants them efficient, smart, go-getting and hard-hitting and, above all, stealthy. No use spooking the cattle. In fact, he's going to beat Heaven at their own game.


	23. sometimes you shouldn't have to choose - Gabriel : Jo Harvelle

They both thought they had a point to prove. They both thought anything would be better than being caught in the middle. So they both left. Gabriel hid; a new face, a new job, a new and refreshing lack of compassion that he cultivated like a drug-crop, because everything he was before only ever got him hurt. 

Jo ran, and she was the same girl the whole way through because she had to show her mom that hunting and tending bar, independance - they're her identity, they're the identity her mom _taught her_ , and she wasn't about to turn her back on that.


	24. because he was special - Ruby : Mary Winchester

In the end they both burn in the ruin of what they built. They both burn for Sam. Ruby's half-expecting it - Mary had half-forgotten, but they both die the same, their cursed wombs ripped open for carrying him. Ruby wasn't his mother but she carried him nonetheless - she fed him from her body and she cradled him as he moved within her and she brought him to term as a vessel, ready for the world he was to make. Mary was his mother and she had no idea what he was going to be but she loved him, pure and simple and deep, a magic as old as the world.

When something came for Sam, the woman who birthed him and the woman who shaped him both paid for it with their lives.


	25. you turn into your parents - John Winchester : Endverse!Dean Winchester

Dean's said no to a lot of people in his life. The ones he regrets are Michael, and years before him, Meg-in-Sam's-body, and before that, Dad.

You kill the things you love, you know. And you become the things you hate. Dean picks up the gun his father died for and packs up a Jeep and goes off to carry out the last instruction his father gave him, because he couldn't save Sam, so now he has to do the other thing.


	26. it's that tiger instinct - Linda Tran : Dean Winchester

There is nothing Mrs Tran won't do for Kevin. Dean respects that about her because he knows what it's like, to have someone you love so much you'd shield them with your own body, your own life, against anything. 

So yeah, she's a pain in his ass. He's pretty sure he's a pain in hers, because sometimes their one identical goal puts them at loggerheads. But he respects her like fury, because he knows she's done a better job than he has.


	27. whoever the damsel in distress is around here, it sure ain't you - Charlie Bradbury : Jo Harvelle

Charlie hacked NORAD at thirteen, when Jo was hustling pool. Jo first got a bullseye on a dartboard with a throwing knife at eight, when Charlie's mom was reading to her about dwarves escaping from prison in barrels. They both carved themselves out niches by taking no shit from anyone who said they couldn't do what they wanted, including the authorities and the Winchesters and their own worst fears. 

There are differences between laptops and guns, but they can have the same effect if you aim really carefully.


	28. you were made this way - Lucifer : the Impala

Dad put in all the parts - the questions, the intelligence. The love that led you astray. The arrogance, the pride, the logic to defend your choices. The way you're driven to make your own way, take what you want, fight rather than roll over, leave rather than give in, betray rather than lie. It was built in. 

She goes where she's driven. It's not always tarmac, it's not always straight, it's not always well-lit. It's not always even on the map. And she's been fixed so many times, there are maybe dozens of cars reborn in her now, riding the highways again. 

She was your undoing, really, and the only unclear thing is whether or not that was part of the plan.


	29. job satisfaction - Gabriel : Alastair

Gabriel likes being the Trickster. He likes giving assholes their comeuppances, doling out some kind of justice with a sense of humour. It's a service he provides - douchebags ruined and damsels rescued. He kind of likes it down here with the mud-monkeys. Some of them are alright, and the ones who aren't provide him with entertainment. It's a fake of a life, but it has its moments.

Alastair is defined by his job, and he's perfectly content with that. No end in sight, no future without a need for him in Hell with his hand on the knife. There's an endless queue of souls. He doesn't care what they've done. That isn't his concern. They're his now, and whatever sins they committed, whatever lies they told to get here, don't matter any more. Because he's going to show them purity - he's going to show them truth.


End file.
